Question Box: Where can I get the blueprints for my house?

The easiest and most direct way to obtain the building plans would be from the builder itself. If you’re not sure who the builder of your home is, you can contact City of Calgary Development Building & Licensing at 403-268-5311. The operators are quite helpful.

If the builder doesn’t have the plans readily available, there is another method of obtaining them:

Call the City of Calgary at 311. Out of area callers can use 403-268-2489.

Ask for Property Research Center in regards to obtaining building plans for a home.

You will receive a 6 digit reference number for your request, and can take up to 4 business days to hear back from them. (Usually it’s the next business day)

Someone from PRC will call back and confirm that you would like the drawings retrieved from their storage facility which can take 3-5 business days.

The cost for them retrieving the drawings (as of the date of this posting) is $55 (non-refundable) and is payable upfront.

Once they have retrieved the plans, they will contact you. You are then able to go down to City Hall and view them.

But since the plans are protected by copyright, if you want copies of them you must first obtain a written permission letter or letter of authorization from the builder.

I would recommend getting this written permission first so you can make copies of the plan during your first visit so you don’t have to come down to City Hall again. If you don’t have the written authorization on hand, you will have 2 weeks from the time PRC retrieved the documents from storage to get it. (They will grant you an extension if you need more time getting the approval from the builder just as long as you let them know)

If the plans are on 11 x 17, the cost is $1 per page and can be made for you right away. However, if the drawings are on a larger format, the cost is $8 per page and will take 2-3 business days for the copies to be made for you.

Building plans are available going back to the 1970’s for residential homes.

What if the builder is no longer in business? You must then visit an Alberta Registries office and do a corporate search to prove that the company is defunct. With that proof you can go down to City Hall in lieu of the builder`s written authorization.

Home sales may be slowing, but prices in six of Canada’s largest housing markets are in bubble territory for the first time in 30 years — and a U.S.-style correction is still not out of the question, according to a report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

David Macdonald, a research associate who authored the report entitled “Canada’s Housing Bubble: An Accident Waiting To Happen” warned that it would take only a 1% to 1.25% mortgage rate increase by Canada’s big banks to cause a housing crash similar to the one the U.S. is grappling with.

It’s a joke to say that Calgary is now in a bubble for the first time in 30 years. With about five seconds of googling a high school student could refute that.

This report is full of some cherrypicking and questionable generalizations.
They never look actually report incomes, yet they acknowledge that a historical ratio of 3-4 times annual household incomes is where the median should be. If you look at Calgary for example, our income:median SFH ratio is what it was in 2005. Why weren’t they crying foul in the last five years when it was higher than that?

Last I checked annual household income is over 90,000 now so doesn’t that make our ratio about 4? And if you believe stats Can, Alberta incomes are still going up 4-5% each year. Don’t historically low interest rates also factor into this equation too?

I do agree with them about places like Van City and Toronto – it’s obviously getting ridiculous there

The CCPA is an admitted far-left think tank – take what they say about economics with a grain of salt.

Yet another report released today, this time by the C.D. Howe Institute.

The report on the risk of a Canadian housing bust, by Jim MacGee, an associate professor of economics at the University of Western Ontario, acknowledges that recent swings in Canadian house prices have raised concerns that a U.S.-style housing bust is looming.

But upon comparing policies and housing market conditions in Canada with those in the U.S., the report concludes that there is little likelihood of a U.S.-style surge in foreclosures or a collapse of house prices in Canada.

It’s all up in the air if you ask me. Certainly there seems to be more talk than every about the remote possibility of a correction in pricing. Banks are a bit more forthcoming than the real estate board, but this is not surprising. While I anticipate that prices will go down, I hope that it won’t be as devastating as in the US. Nobody needs any of that stuff happening in their back yard.

thanks for the info but it just seems like a lot of work and cost for what i need it for
i just need to drill a hole in my floor so i can run a wire from my upstairs internet router to deices on the basement, but i dont want to risk hitting any wires